Books, food, friends, and Virginia Woolf.
"I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingly, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham."--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Perhaps Tellingly

After writing about book-buying sprees recently (over at the LBC), I got to go on one yesterday. I was surprised at how much I’ve been influenced by litblogs and podcasts in what I chose:

John Banville, The Sea because Mark Sarvas enthused about it

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss because of the Booker

Nell Freudenberger, The Dissident because she gave an amazing interview on WNYC and then Lauren Cerand hosted her reading

Laird Hunt, The Exquisite because Bud Parr is so enthusiastic about it

Tayari Jones, The Untelling because I like her blog

Julie Powell, Julie & Julia, somewhat skeptically, but she is a cook and a blogger and I do expect to find it funny, and

Lauren Slater’s Best American Essays, 2006but not

Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions even though I’m tempted and it’s clearly a triumph of book design. Have you seen it? It’s like a really gorgeous issue of McSweeney’s. But I listened to Michael Silverblatt’s interview with him on WKRC’s bookworm, after hearing and reading lots of buzz on the book and he was so incredibly pretentious I could not bear it. (I haven’t listened to the Bat Segundo version yet—I’ll have to do that.)

I’m intrigued by the conceit—a love story from two perspectives, one running from front to back, one from back to front, meeting in the middle. Each page has the same number of lines, half from the woman’s perspective, half from the man’s, and then marginalia that puts this time-bending story into historical context. It is, in short, way too complicated to describe in full.

And Danielewski is clearly really, really smart. Am I jealous? Maybe. But when I heard him describe all the rules he’d set for himself and say, “…perhaps tellingly, the word home is never used…” I threw in the towel for now.

Perhaps tellingly? As a thing to say about your own crazy work? That struck me as beyond pretension. It’s not “telling” when it’s your own deliberate choice and there is no “perhaps” about it. How about “Because they’re drifters, I decided to banish the word home from my vocabulary for this book.”

But with Danielewski's House of Leaves, what amazed me most was not the erudite pyrotechnics, but the solid backbone of the story. It had all the mythic elements, and the climax genuinely moved me (although I never would have expected to be so emotionally involved by such an experimental novel). All that to say, I haven't read Only Revolutions yet, but I know that Danielewski has the core narrative talents. It's just a matter of whether they show up here.

House of Leaves was completely engrossing. I read it with tiny post-it notes to follow the different idea trails. (My favorite being a discussion of George Herbert and Echo, with another on the meaning of the word "uncanny".)

That said, it's not without it's flaws...but I'm looking forward to exploring this new one when I'm up north for Christmas.

Much of HoL is about grief--and I agree with John Fox. But I completely understand your aversion to pretension, Anne. If it was my first encounter with him, I'd probably head the other direction too!